New Report: Global Inequality Skyrockets

Picture: David Shankbone/Flickr Alex Kane - A new report released by the anti-poverty group Oxfam is filled with staggering statistics that make clear the depth of the inequality problem.   The world should work to end extreme wealth by 2025 and reduce the massive inequality that has skyrocketed over the past twenty years, the anti-poverty group Oxfam states in a new report [pdf]. While discourse on inequality has grown more prominent in recent years thanks to Occupy Wall Street and major institutions highlighting the problem...

The Resurrection of Sixto Rodriguez

Picture: Sixto Rodriguez courtesy the_junes/Flickr Richard Pithouse - Searching for Sugarman, Malik Bendjelloul's film about the reception of Sixto Rodriguez in South Africa, continues to accumulate awards, critical acclaim and commercial success as its momentum gathers in the lead up to the Academy Awards at the end of next month. It is carrying Rodriguez, seventy years old and partially blind, onto the stages of the Royal Albert Hall and Carnegie Hall, festivals like Glastonbury, Coachella and Primavera and into the pages of the world's great newspapers. Next...

New Film Exposes Hidden Truths of Covert US Warfare

Picture: Adapted by SACSIS from various sources. Video Premiering this week at the Sundance Film Festival in Utah, the new documentary "Dirty Wars: The World is a Battlefield" follows investigative reporter Jeremy Scahill to Afghanistan, Somalia and Yemen as he chases down the hidden truths behind America’s expanding covert wars. The film's director Rick Rowley says, "One of the things that humbles both of us is that when you arrive in a village in Afghanistan and knock on someone’s door, you’re the first American...

Obama's Inauguration Speech Rings a Different Tone

Picture: As seen on the Real News Network. Video In Washington on Monday, Barack Obama began his second term as president of America with an inauguration speech. John Nichols, Washington correspondent for the Nation Magazine provides some perspective on the speech. Nichols is cautiously optimistic that Obama's next four years will be different. According to Nichols, "I have never seen Barack Obama as a progressive," but Obama does respond to pressure, so progressives should listen to what the president is saying and "raise...

Intervention in Mali: War on Terror Forever

Picture:  Staff Sgt. Edward Braly/Wikimedia Commons Pepe Escobar - And the winner of the Oscar for Best Sequel of 2013 goes to...The Global War on Terror (GWOT), a Pentagon production. Abandon all hope those who thought the whole thing was over with the cinematographic snuffing out of "Geronimo", aka Osama bin Laden, further reduced to a fleeting cameo in the torture-enabling flick Zero Dark Thirty. It's now official - coming from the mouth of the lion, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Martin Dempsey, and duly posted at the AFRICOM...

From Here to Timbuktu: A Brief History of Mali

Picture: Wikipedia Kwei Quartey - As early as the 11th century, Timbuktu was a hub for trade in salt and gold between black Africans, the Tuareg, and Arabs from the north. A meeting place for African scholars, Timbuktu was also a center of learning where thousands of manuscripts and books were written, and where universities much older than Harvard or Oxford were founded. The broad region of West Africa that includes present-day Mali has had its share of geopolitical turmoil since at least the eighth century. From around...